Slavery in Cape Town, 1806 to 1834

In an influential article on the evolution of Afro-American society on the British mainland of North America, written in 1980, Ira Berlin charged slave historians with having ''produced an essentially static vision of Afro-American life. From Stanley Elkins' Sambo to John W.Blassingame's Nat-Sambo-Jack typology, scholars of all persuasions have held time constant and ignored the influence of place". Contrary to the monolithic presentations of the slave experience in the existing literature, Berlin maintains that at least three regionally distinct North American slave systems emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a Northern nonplantation system and two Southern plantation systems (centred respectively on the Carolina/Georgia lowcountry and the Chesapeake). Regional variations in economic and demographic patterns (i.e. the demands of particular staples, the various configurations of whites and blacks, and variations in African-creole ratios) are shown to have underpinned the evolution of distinctive socio-cultural patterns in these three areas. Furthermore, Berlin demonstrates how temporal changes (specifically with regard to the differential impact of the slave trade in the mid-eighteenth century) superimposed themselves upon existing regional variations in shaping the North American slave experience - or, more accurately, experiences. Thus: "no matter how complete recent studies of black life appear, they are limited to the extent that they provide a static and singular vision of a dynamic and complex society".